Development Philosophy and Building Straight Forward Plugins with Pippin Williamson

Joe Casabona: This episode is brought to you by our great sponsors.

Have you ever struggled to find the time to promote all of your amazing content on social networks? Are you tired of logging into several different places and platforms to complete all of your digital marketing needs? Don’t worry anymore. Social Web Suite has got your back.

Social Web Suite, the social sharing platform built for professionals by Hype Studio will take care of all of your social media marketing needs. So all you need to do is relax and concentrate on growing your business. Start your free trial today and see what all the buzzes are about. Head over to buildpodcast.net/hype for more information. That’s buildpodcast.net/hype. And when you are ready to make the purchase, make sure to use the discount code, ‘buildsomething’ and save yourself some money.

Project Panorama is a WordPress project management plugin that visually communicates project progress to your clients and teams. At a glance, your clients can see exactly how close the project is to completion, what has been done and what will be done next. Panorama is meticulously designed to impress your clients and save you time, allowing you to build more. Check it out at build podcast.net/pm. And for a limited time, you can use the offer code ‘howibuiltit’ for 20% off. That’s ‘howibuiltit’, all in one word for 20% off.

And now, on with the show.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the new episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today, my guest is Pippin Williamson. Pippin, how are you today?

Pippin Williamson: I’m doing just fine.

Joe Casabona: Very nice. Thank you for joining me. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show.

Pippin Williamson: My pleasure.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So, today you have a bunch of properties, a bunch of different things that you do, but today we’re going to be talking about Restrict Content Pro. Is that right?

Pippin Williamson: That’s correct.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So why don’t we start off with kind of who you are, what you do, and then the idea behind RCP?

Pippin Williamson: Sure. So my name is Pippin, and I am a plugin developer. I live in Hutchinson, Kansas, and I’ve been building WordPress plugins for, I don’t know, eight, nine years now. I started as a, I started building commercial plugins around eight years ago, and then eventually turned that into my full-time job and then slowly built a company around it.

So now I run a company called Sandhills Development. We are a team of about 15 people and we build a slew of different products primarily focused in e-commerce and membership. I’m sorry, three main ones would be Easy Digital Downloads, which is an e-commerce plugin, Affiliate WP for affiliate marketing, and then Restrict Content Pro, which is a membership plugin.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Yeah. And, so where did the name, I’m sure you’ve been asked this before, but where did the name of the Sandhills come from?

Pippin Williamson: Sandhills is an area that I grew up in when I was a kid. My parents lived in a place called the Sand Hills in Kansas, which is very aptly named because there’s a lot of sand in the Hills and it was just kind of a way for me to give credit to where I grew up in, where I’ve felt at home. So that’s where sandhills come from.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Nice. I’m resisting the urge to make a…Oh my gosh! I’m totally blanking on the movie right now, ‘There’s no place like home.’ I was like really trying not to say that [Cross talk 03:29.18] a boss, man. I can’t say that that was actually the first play. I did drama club and that was the first play I was ever in.

Pippin Williamson: I think it was the first or second for me as well.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Cool. Very cool. So, you work on a lot of stuff, you are, I don’t know if you would label yourself this, but I think a lot of people view you as one of the more, maybe most successful plugin developers out there, like commercial WordPress plugin developers. So it’ll be really great to get some of your insight. And specifically with Restrict Content Pro, from what I understand this was, was this actually your first commercial plugin or your second?

Pippin Williamson: It wasn’t the first, but it was one of the first bigger ones. I had probably a series of five to 10 plugins before Restrict Content Pro that were all reasonably small. There were two that were a little bit bigger, but Restrict Content Pro is the first one that definitely kind of took off and kind of made me realize, you know, I think this is something that I could focus on full-time. And it was something that was the first one that became much bigger than anything else. It was the first one that I brought someone else on to work with me on to help with customer support development, etcetera. But it was not technically the first one though.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Gotcha. And what was the idea behind that?

Pippin Williamson: Well, it was pretty simple. Honestly, I was running my own personal website called pippinsplugins.com where I was writing development tutorials on WordPress and plugins. In general, I was trying to create this site that was kind of a resource for other people that wanted to learn how to write plugins because at the time there weren’t really any other resources and I wanted to run a membership portion of it. And I wasn’t thrilled with the current options available. Some because they just were a little lackluster or something, because I didn’t know about them. There were probably five or six membership plugins at the time. And so I just decided, you know, I think I can build this up. I’ll just build it for myself and use it for my own site. And then through doing that, I’ll build it as a generic plugin that I can release and other people could use.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Pippin Williamson: That was really all of us. It was trying to build a basic membership site for myself, and building the tool to make that possible.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. And I think this is maybe the case with at least your three biggest plugins, right? You’re scratching your own itch.

Pippin Williamson: Uhum. absolutely.

Joe Casabona: So cool. That seems to be a common thread with the guests I have on the show. They’re always, a lot of them are developers and they’re like, “Well, I want this and it doesn’t exist.” And so that’s really cool. So I would love to talk a lot about the, I mean, you’re successful in both business and development. So I want to make sure that we touch on both of those topics. So I think maybe we already touched on the answer to this question, but when you were doing your research, or did you do any research while you were developing Restrict Content Pro?

Pippin Williamson: In terms of like product research, market research, No. Well, I guess I’ve been saying it a little bit. So I had my own experience through building my own membership site. I was also working as the developer for another site that was building a membership system. And so my market research was purely that I have two sites. One that I am the developer is like a client relationship and one that is my own. And neither one of us are happy with the current options that are out there. And so that told me there was a need. That was the absolute extent of the market research. Beyond that, there was just the developer research of, “Well, I don’t know how to do this so I’m going to try to figure it out. I’m going to research. I’m gonna find tutorials, etcetera. I’m going to break things way too often until I figure out how to make it work.”

Joe Casabona: Cool. Gotcha. Gotcha. And so now you’ve, over the last, you know, few months maybe, you know, you’ve kind of doubled down on the plugin. What kind of your research process now for adding features or you’re choosing what to keep and what to kind of let go by the wayside?

Pippin Williamson: So Restrict Content Pro started, it’s now almost six years old. It will be six in January, coming up here in about a month. And six years is a pretty old product when it comes to an online to an internet product. Definitely not near the oldest, but it’s, that’s, I don’t know what close to half the life of WordPress. So it has a history which also means that we’ve kind of compiled this list of feature requests and bugs and issues that people have over a long period of time.

Pippin Williamson: For the last two years or so, Restrict Content Pro got kind of neglected mostly as my other projects. Easy Digital Downloads and affiliate MVP took off and kind of dominated my time and the team of the time. So basically, we had this product where we had lots and lots of feature requests, and issues reported and wants, and desires from customers, but they were kind of getting, they weren’t necessarily getting ignored. We just didn’t have the time to focus on it because it was such a smaller project. 

So we had this big list and that was our research. That was basically, that was our information that said, “Okay, we’re ready to double down on this and keep bringing it back to life. Here’s what we need to do. Here’s the features we need to add. Here’s the issues we need to solve. Here’s the challenges people have”. And so it didn’t really take any further research beyond that. We already had all of the information collected.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Cool. And as far as getting input from people, you know, I know that mastermind groups are a big thing. Do you, do you talk to your peers and your customers, like, who were kind of the people that you go to for advice?

Pippin Williamson: Both peers and customers. And sometimes peers and customers are the same people. We tried to listen to what people told us. Some people are really good about giving feedback. Some people are not as good about it, but we still try to listen to everybody and genuinely be receptive to what they need to do, what they want to do. And then take that all with a grain of salt, because just because somebody wants to do something doesn’t mean that we should make it possible for them to do that. But we still try to listen to it and figure out, “Okay, where is, what do we need to do in our product that allows that benefits the most people and that also benefits us at the same time.?” And it’s sometimes a challenge to figure out what you need to work on or what you should work on. But overall, just trying to be receptive.

And then also being, number one, being open to feedback. But also to seek, actually seeking feedback. And so we will go to customers, we will go to peers and say, “What do you need? What do you want? What is, what are the pain points that you have?”

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. And do you find it hard to get that kind of feedback? I know that there’s been discussions about how do we get more people to rate plugins in the plugin repository and things like that. You know, I have a hard time, I have to always ask people to rate this podcast on iTunes. So do you find asking help or do you need to find the right people to ask?

Pippin Williamson: I think it depends a lot on the person. First, nature asking. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s hard to get people to stop giving you feedback. I don’t think private feedback is hard to get. I think public feedback is hard to get. Public quality feedback. The thing is that, like, when it comes to leaving a review publicly or publicly giving feedback on something, you tend to get two kinds of people. You get the people that are really, really thrilled and they just want to sing your praises. And then you get the people that are really, really upset or angry. And neither one of those are really super valuable for getting really genuine feedback because there tends to be either just a lot of fluff or a lot of just anger or emotion in it.

But getting a level of response with a lot of insightful information can be tricky. But I think it’s a lot easier to get that privately than publicly because a lot of people just are not necessarily comfortable with giving their opinions in a public place.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. That’s some great thoughts right there. I know that you know, usually people will, you’re exactly right. If they’re angry, they’re ready to like slam whoever on Twitter and in the reviews and stuff like that. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you know, my wife will always ask, “You should try something on” and say like, “Does this look good?” And you know, I say yes. And I’m not, yeah, I’m not being disingenuous. I just, I, you know, I think she looks good. So she has to definitely ask somebody else those questions. So, Cool. Very cool. 

And then, as far as, you know, peers or, are you like, are you part of a mastermind group or anything like that?

Pippin Williamson: I am. I have a couple of groups that I participate in and we get together, try to every couple of weeks and chat and we’ll share plenty of things that we’re working on, or projects that we have or broad results of projects that we’ve done. And that is very, very valuable.

Joe Casabona: Cool. I’ve said that so much on the show that I think it’s, you know, I’m part of one in the feedback that I get from the people in my group is great.

So with that, we’re kind of on to the title question, which is, how did you build Restrict Content Pro? And we can go like super technical. We can talk about the business side. I’d love to get a nice mix of both.

Pippin Williamson: Sure. Technically, basically, I looked at it and I had this need that I wanted. I wanted to allow people to pay for a membership, be charged monthly, quarterly, or yearly. And then I wanted to give access to tutorials to those people. Basically, I figured out how to talk to PayPal, how to sit, send information to PayPal when somebody is trying to buy something. And I figured out how to detect when PayPal processes a subscription payment. And then basically keep a communication line open between the website and PayPal. And then also did the same thing with Stripe. Stripe being one of the main processors for credit cards. So that was really just diving into their developer APIs and figuring out how to utilize those. 

And then figuring out how to say like store information about what kind of membership level or access level customers have inside of the WordPress database. And that was, that’s really on a kind of an overview level that is Restrict Content Pro like that is you are giving away for customers to register an account. And then you are keeping track of their payments and you’re keeping track of their membership status. And then you were hiding or showing content accordingly. That’s kind of where it started simply. It was just managing that. 

Then as the product was released and people started using it, we started adding a whole lot of other features as well. For example, like the ability to have multiple subscription levels or set prices, create discount codes, and really kind of like fine-tune controls on what content gets restricted to what members. So for example, if you have a gold subscription level, they get access to this content. In this content, you have a silver level and a bronze level, and a platinum level.  They can each have different kinds of duration. And so one of them is a monthly subscription and one is a yearly subscription. One gets access to content A, B, and C. One gets B and C. One gets A, B, C, and D. You start getting into those kinds of features and you just start building them one at a time. 

Early on, I don’t think there was any kind of overview or generalized idea of what the product would eventually be like. We didn’t have this list of features as, “Okay, we need discounts. We need this kind of content restrictions settings. We need category-level restrictions. We need to really restrict comments. We need people to upgrade and downgrade between subscriptions. We need people to cancel subscriptions. We need to promote subscriptions. We need none of that was there early on. I mean, those are all features that now do exist inside of the plugin, but they come from feedback. We talked about feedback earlier, getting that kind of information and feedback from customers and users. And you add them one piece at a time. So if you look at like the feature set of Restrict Content Pro that’s not even remotely what it started with. And I think that something that people tend to get a little too caught up on, whether they’re building a product if they have this idea in their mind, says, “Okay, we need this. We need this. We need all of these features” and it’s not released until those features all exist. And I think that’s the way the products die is trying to go after that like a perfect model initially. 

I mean, if we look at it like version 1.0 Restrict Content Pro, it was so damn simple there. it wasn’t even remotely the same as it is now. But it was, it made it a viable product. And then you slowly add a piece and you add a piece and you add a piece.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So it seems like, I was, you know, that I’m glad that you went there. I was just about to say, you seem like the king of the minimum viable product. I think like you kind of say, this is, these are the things that I need to have because you’re absolutely right. I’m working on a podcast plugin right now and I’m like, “I can do this, this and this and this.” and I should really focus on, like, these are the three things that’ll make it different from what’s already out there, right. And then the rest is kind of just getting it to market first, right? So cool. 

As far as kind of your development process goes, I’d love to hear two things: How you go about learning because you put out these really high-quality products. You,  do you still review for the plugins repo?

Pippin Williamson: I try to, I don’t do nearly as much as I would like to. But I do try to jump in at least once every week or so and get a bunch of reviews done. 

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Pippin Williamson: Mika is the machine there? She does more so.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. So, I would still love to hear like how you learn, and then what tools do you use? Like what’s your development environment?

Pippin Williamson: So I don’t know if I’m abnormal in this way, but I try to keep my development environment as simple as possible. I used to work on, well, over the last 15, even 20 years has been involved with internet stuff, I’ve always worked on about every OS out there. So I’ve worked, I’ve had an SX machine. I’ve had a Windows machine. I’ve had a Linux machine. I’ve had android tablets, iOS tablets. I work across a lot of different machines and always have. 

Now, today I work almost exclusively on Apple, but I still use a Linux box. I still use a Windows machine every now and then. And the reason I say that is because something that’s always been important to me in my day-to-day work, whether we’re talking email or development or anything else, is that I want my systems to work no matter what platform I’m working on. I also have kind of a general rule that says if my laptop falls in the lake today, I want to be up and running in two hours. 

So if I walk into a store and I buy a new laptop, whether it’s a Macbook, windows or anything else, it doesn’t matter what brand it is. I want to be up and running in two hours or less. So with that, I keep everything incredibly simple. I don’t use a lot of advanced tools. I don’t use really powerful ideas or anything. I use sublime text too, and I use Git. And if I have those two pieces, those two tools, I can do everything I need to do, every now and then we use more advanced tools that help us do various things, anything from unit testing to dependency management. But they’re nice to Haves. They’re not requirements.

And so I’ve always done to that. And sometimes it means that I work a little bit slower. Sometimes it means that I work faster. Sometimes it means that I’m doing more manual debugging instead of relying on a tool. But it also means that my requirements to work are much, much more minimal. And that’s what has been pretty important to me. What was the other part of your question?

Joe Casabona: How do you learn new things?

Pippin Williamson: I dive in headfirst and say, “Okay, this is what I need to do. Let’s figure out how to make it happen.” It’s kind of what that’s kind of a bird’s eye view of it, but that’s really it.

So to bring it back to Restrict Content Pro for a moment, one of the important parts of making that plugin work was the communication to PayPal and to Stripe. So for example, if I registered, if I create a subscription on my website, and then I send that information to PayPal, PayPal, and or Stripe are then going to handle rebuilding that subscription. So a month later or a year later, they’re going to process a charge and they’re going to send a notification to a website that says, “Hey, we processed the charge. Here’s the details, do what you need with it.” So I, at the time, had no idea how to handle that kind of data from PayPal or Stripe. And we’d call that a webhook or an instant payment notification. I had no idea how to do it, None whatsoever. I knew that that was the system I had to use. And so I said, “Okay, let’s figure it out.”

So Google is my best friend. I’m going to figure out how to do it. I made something that works in MVP and I’m going to release it. And then we improve from there. And I think I treat most of my development that way. We have a need, we know what we need to do, and we know what needs to happen. I may not know how I may not know the exact syntax for it. I may not know the exact methods of working with the API, but as long as I have a goal insight of what I need to do, I can figure out how to make it happen.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Nice.

Pippin Williamson: Am really good with [Inaudible 20:47.25]

Joe Casabona: Nice. I always think about like what it was like programming before the internet became a great resource. Like I imagine it’s just piles of textbooks, like on your desk, right. That’s I mean, I don’t know. That’s how most of my computer science professors’ desks look and I assume that’s why.

Pippin Williamson: I’m sure.

Joe Casabona: So, which is quick, like a real quick question, which is better documented PayPal or Stripe?

Pippin Williamson: Oh, Stripe definitely.

Joe Casabona: I kind of knew the answer to that one, but I wanted to get confirmation

Pippin Williamson: So, to get Paypal a little bit of credit, they’ve been around for a very long time. And documentation is very difficult to update.  I mean, documentation is a full-time job for any reasonably sized product and their doc, their developer documentation, it has always been notoriously poor or inaccurate or conflicting or whatever. But in the last year, it has improved substantially. I mean, it is dramatically better than it used to be. But my, one of my favorite examples of PayPal documentation is when you go research error codes. So like, let’s say that I do something with the API and I get an error message back and it says profile ID invalid, Okay. So now what you would expect to do with documentation is to research that error message and get an explanation of why it is invalid? the explanation for why the profile is invalid, “Profile id” is invalid. It’s like the silliest explanation ever because there was no explanation. That is unfortunately the nature of PayPal documentation.

Stripe is the complete opposite of that. As a developer, working with Stripe is a pleasure. And everything from the actual codebase itself to how well things work to the documentation, to the event logging to everything it’s just glorious. 

Joe Casabona: Awesome. That’s good to know. I’ve never. I haven’t used Stripe, like in a coding sense, I’ve integrated it with other products. But I mean, now everything has a Stripe plugin and I assume, cause it’s so easy to work with. So, Cool. So, bringing it back to Restrict Content Pro what are your plans for the future of this product? You know, what are the big things coming down the pipe?

Pippin Williamson: Well, it was mentioned a little bit earlier, Restrict Content Pro kind of got neglected for a while. And we as a team decided, “Okay, let’s rebuild it.”  We were going, we basically came to a point where we had to either sell it, let it die slowly, or rebuild ourselves. And we decided to rebuild it. And I don’t mean to rebuild a plugin from scratch. I just mean bring it back to life, Give new energy, maintain it actively, and actively work on it. 

So the first thing that we did, and this started in about March or April, is that we put a full-time team member working on it exclusively doing support development, documentation, et cetera. That was the first step.

The next step was to get out a whole bunch of new updates for it, as well as add some new add ons and additional features to it. And some of those would include things like Full Rest API group or umbrella accounts, and then things like an integration with help scout. We have a plan for an integration with Zapier and a whole bunch of other add ons

For the next few months, we have several things in motion. First is we are working on a new version, for version 2.7 which has just been making a whole lot of improvements to the core plugin. Hopefully making some improvements to emails, discount codes, to some other core features that have been around for a long time, but have been somewhat neglected or just need some improvements to them. 

And then we’ve got a few more add-ons that we want to build. but I think we’re not remotely done with the project, but we, I think we’ve done six months of the heavy legwork that kind of was required to bring Restrict Content Pro back to life and to elevate it back to a full-scale product. And I think we’re mostly done with that. And so now it’s just going to be that continual work on it that maintenance the new introducing those new features, taking care of the existing customers, and building that continually, building that customer base.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha. Gotcha.  cool. So before I wrap up with the last question, right? That I always ask, I went to your Wordcamp US talk, it answered a lot of really good questions there. And one was the, but one was how you felt the pricing model for EDD specifically wasn’t great. right. And I know that you got, I think at least one person like pushed back on that and asked like, why. So as you kind of reevaluate things for Restrict Content Pro, do you mind talking about like how you plan on pricing that? What do you think works and what doesn’t work and stuff like that?

Pippin Williamson: So, one of the first things that we did when we decided that we were going to rebuild this product is that we changed the price model from what it was. So it used to be sold,  just as a, well, it was sold pretty similarly to the way it is now. But we basically had a single-site version of a multi-site version and then on the same version. And then we had a couple of add-ons that we sold as all the card purchases. That worked okay. But we changed it when we rebuilt it. So now there is a single-site version. There’s a multiple-site version. There’s an unlimited site version. And then there’s an unlimited site version with unlimited updates and support for life. So it’s an ultimate version.

The two high versions which we call ultimate and professional have an added bonus that if you buy those, you also get immediate access to all of our pro apps at once. So we have these various add-ons including group accounts. Rest API helps get integration and about 10 or 15 others that are all these additional features. But they’re only available if you buy the professional or the ultimate version.

Joe Casabona: Gotcha.

Pippin Williamson: So that’s the pricing model that we use for Affiliate WP when we launched it a little over two years ago. And it works really, really well. There are a couple of benefits to it. Number one, from a business perspective, it changes, it dramatically increases the number of customers that are instead of it dramatically increases the average value of a customer. Because if your only distinction between licensing levels is the number of sites that you can activate it on or something like that, the vast majority of your customers will be the most, most basic level license, your local license. If you dramatically incentivize higher-level licenses, then you will get a lot more customers that are the opposite of that. And so we get a lot of customers interacting with the $200 level as opposed to the $50 level. And it’s because of the incentivization of those pro-add-ons. And that works really, really well.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. nice.

Pippin Williamson: The model’s a little different where we just say we have a free plugin and then all of these extra features are, it’s $50 for this one. It’s $50 for that one. It’s $20 for that one. And it’s kind of all of our purchasing. And there’s various issues with that. But, yeah. 

Oh, so with research content pro we adopted the same model that Affiliate WP uses, and that can pretty much guarantee you are largely responsible for more than doubling our revenue in the last six months. 

Joe Casabona: Wow. That’s pretty awesome. And I mean, you know, what you said is pretty clear from your pricing model, right? I mean, if you’re going to be using it on a bunch of different sites, you know, like me as a developer, if I’m like, I’m going to pump out membership sites, I’m going to go with the ultimate, right. Because it pays for itself in like two and a half years or two and a quarter years or something like that. So.

Pippin Williamson: Or less if you’re building a multiple-site. I mean, honestly, it doesn’t take very many sites before that pays for that site.

Joe Casabona: Right. And I could see like with EDD, you know, somebody buys the $20 add-on, and then if they require a bunch of support, you know, you’re almost losing money on that. So that makes perfect sense. I’m going to remember that for when I eventually released this podcast plugin or some other thing. I’m like dying to get into the product space, just like, as a small sidebar. 

Pippin Williamson: It’s a fun world to begin. There’s challenges to it, but it’s overall pretty fun.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s so different from my day job. You know, I think I’d have, it would be an interesting way to flex my brain. So cool. So, we are banging up against the time here. So I want to ask you the last question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Pippin Williamson: Trade secrets? Hmm. Work hard. Work your ass off. But don’t be afraid to take a break. I think this is kind of the thing that I’ve been about recently. I spent a long time, the first few years just working harder than I can imagine. 18 hour days, 20 hour days. I mean, I started all of this with a head of a part-time job, as well as a full-time class schedule in university at the time when I was first building all of these. And so I was pretty used to working really late at night, working through early, super early in the morning, and working between classes anywhere I could fit in 30 minutes of working on it. And then I kind of, I just kind of got myself into that habit and continued doing that. And eventually I just completely burned out and I couldn’t do it anymore. 

And so since then, I’ve started to take much better care of myself, both physically and mentally. And so I worked very hard, but I try to take breaks. So whether it’s taking a break in the evening or walking away. And then during the weekends, you gotta revitalize yourself. And, I think that’s really important for building anything successfully in the long term. So yeah, don’t be afraid to take breaks.

Joe Casabona: Nice. That’s great advice.  And I, this is also building off something you said at WordCamp us, which was a kind of find a hobby That’s not that doesn’t put you in front of a computer screen right. So why don’t we close the show with your hobby away from the computer?

Pippin Williamson: Sure. I have two. One of them is cycling. I really like to ride my bike. I don’t do it as much of a hobby now as I used to, because I bike about seven miles a day to my office and back where I used to work for my home. And now I work out of my home office.

But my other one is making beer. So I really, really, really liked beer. I really liked the science and the chemistry behind it. I liked the process. And so I have a small brewery in my basement, and so I make a lot of beer. I share it with friends. I share it with my family. If you are somebody that enjoys a beer, beware because if we sit down for dinner, I’ll forget talking about work. I like to talk about beer. So, be prepared.

Joe Casabona: That’s awesome. That’s the same exact reason I like cigars. And the only thing that beer has on cigars I think is, that I can’t start rolling cigars in my basement. And again, I need like a farm and like all this equipment to grow tobacco and stuff.

Pippin Williamson: So maybe a barrier to entry is a little, yes.

Joe Casabona: Yes. So very cool. Well Pippin, thank you so much for talking to me.

Pippin Williamson: My pleasure.

Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for listening and thanks to our great guests and fantastic sponsors. If you liked the show, please rate it and subscribe on iTunes in Google play or at Spotify or whatever your podcast app of choice is. If you have any questions, be sure to reach out at streamlined.fm.

And finally, until next week. Get out there, and build something.